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Another use for this
Authored by: ret on Oct 30, '02 08:34:18PM

There are some seriously strange words in this file.

I used this file in one of those "write a program to prove I can do it" moments. "The Sydney Morning Herald" newspaper (of Sydney, Australia), publishes a puzzle everyday called "Target". It has a 3x3 grid with one letter per cell. The object is to find as many words as possible that are four or more letters long from those letters. Plurals and proper names are not allowed, of course. The other wrinkle is that all words must contain the letter that appears in the centre cell. You must also identify the nine-letter word that uses all the letters.

Clear enough? Anyway, I wrote a perl program to solve it for the benefit of my local baristas who used to leave the puzzle on their coffee cart for customers to help solve. Something to while away the hour on the train in the morning. The joys of a unix laptop ;-)

I discovered all these weird words in that dictionary because when the program ran, it was able to find at least 50% more words than the puzzle creators believed could be found, and some of them were very strange indeed.

I know this is barely on-topic. Sorry.

cheers
RET



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